18 Jun 2013

I see
SNP supporters and others are enthusiastically sharing an article from Inside Housing reporting Alex Salmond's pledge to
abolish the Bedroom Tax in an independent Scotland, Good news. But
big deal?

Because
the very earliest this can be done is 2016, and more realistically
it will be 2017-18 before any law changes are enacted. So over four
years from now. Does anyone really think any but a tiny minority hit
here and now by the Bedroom Tax will survive by then? So a near
meaningless pledge. And a real cheap one, given the numbers by then
involved

So
tokenism. As token as the pledge from all SNP Councils
(and some Labour ones) not to evict any council tenant for bedroom
tax arrears in year one of the tax, And note, this pledge only apples
if a tenant “co-operates”, however that is defined by a Council
official. But, co-operation or not, it takes about a year to evict
someone anyway.

And more
fundamentally, many of the Councils committed to this pledge have
near no social housing to evict anyone from. SNP Argyll and Bute for
example has not a single council house – all transferred to local Housing Associations years ago, and all Housing Associations are
completely exempt from local council non-eviction pledges.

So SNP
folks and others, you are being sold mince here. Scottish mince –
but mince.

What the
Scottish Government can and must do, beyond the extra £5m already
allocated to advice welfare advice services centres, is as follows:

(1) Increase
significantly the Discretionary Housing Payment (DHP) funds to
Councils over and above the £10 million allocated by the Westminster
Government to help those worst affected by the Bedroom Tax. The
Scottish Government can legally top this fund up by up to one and a
half times, so immediately the fund could rise to £25 million –
near on half the amount Scots are set to lose as a result of the
Bedroom Tax

(2) Increase by a similar or greater amount central grant
funding to social landlords to enable met to more realistically
carry, and in some case write off debt incurred by their Bedroom
Tax affected tenants, Many of these tenants simply can't pay, and
widely available statistics are now showing they are not paying in
significant numbers

(3) Give serious consideration to The Govan Law
Center proposed amendment to the Housing Scotland Act which would offer
enhanced increased legal protection from eviction to tenants in rent arrears incurred as a
result of the Bedroom Tax. And SNP whips could make a start by
telling its committee members who control the Scottish Parliament's
Public Petitions Committee, which meets on Tuesday 25h June to consider
the GLC amendment, to allow the main petitioner, Mike Dailly,
Director of the Center to speak to his own petition. Hardly a radical
idea. Kind of a self-evidently sensible one. And totally cost free.

But the
first two elements of this three part package, they would cost.
Around £50 million would be my estimate, much the same sum as calculated byShelter
Scotland and the Scottish TUC. Not a trivial sum. But a findable
sum for sure. Less that 0.1% of the Scottish Government's total block
grant. A block grant SNP and previous Labour administrations have
succeed in underspending by this amount and more in near every year
since devolution.

So do
this Alex, and poor people – real poor people, amongst the poorest
in Scotland - might warm to your pledge to abolish the Bedroom Tax
altogether come independence: The final step in a process you will
have already started with them. And can start tomorrow.

28 May 2013

DEREK BATEMAN ( BBC Radio Scotland): What do we make of Denis Healey admitting that when [North Sea] oil was discovered, Labour – a Labour government,
ahead of a referendum, interestingly, on the constitution of Scotland –
misled, deliberately misled the Scots about the value of oil?

MARGARET CURRAN MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland) : Well, Derek, I
don’t know anything about that, those times, I don’t know the basis on
which Denis Healey said that, I don’t know the argument, I don’t know
the papers around that.

DB: But you’re the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland! You’re a senior Labour figure, I mean, he was a Labour chancellor.

MC: I know I’m getting on a bit, but I wasn’t around in Denis Healey’s days.

Oh yes she was.

Unless
it was another Margaret Curran I met who was Secretary of Glasgow
University Labour Club, the biggest in the UK, when Healey was Labour
Chancellor in the Callaghan Government. This would have been in 1978, two
years after Healey had made global front page news and labour movement
noteriety after he went to the IMF for a bail out in exchange for huge
public spending cuts.

Indeed not only did 20 year
Margaret know who he was, but was sufficiently angry with him to be
calling for his resignation. Because, difficult though it may be to
imagine, Margaret was at that time was a prominent supporter of the
Labour left opposition . And her, "not around" line is as
credible as David Cameron claiming he was "not around"
when Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax: As credible as would the current
Secretary of Oxford University Conservative Association claiming in 30
years time he was "not around" when George Osbourne slashed
welfare budgets.

So what is it about today's Scottish
Labour Party that makes decent enough people, spout such
untruths on Scotland's national radio station? Deny their own past? Be
"not around?"

I think on this one it is
obvious. Because Margaret well remembers that, in addition to being in
the middle of an economic crisis in 1978, the Labour Party in Scotland,
and grassroots activists like her in particular, were under immense
political pressure from the SNP, which with 11 MPs at Westminster and
opinion poll rating s touching 40% threatened to wipe Labour out
whenever the next UK General Election came around. It had already near
done it in the Council elections on May 1977, where for the first time
in decades Labour had been swept from office in Glasgow. Or were you
'not around" for that either Margaret?

Like, me she
will certainly remember spending the best part of the Spring of 1978
campaigning for Donald Dewar in the knife edge Garscadden by-election,
where the SNP started as clear favorites to take Labour out in one of
its west central Scotland heartland seats, a success that would have
left every last one of them vulnerable. The SNP rallying cry at the
time? "It's Scotland's Oil", backed up by detailed proposal on how a
national oil fund in an independent Scotland could transform our country
and deliver prosperity and social justice for folks in places like
Garscadden and beyond. Folks like Margaret indeed.

Scottish
Labour, with an able candidate in Donald Dewar, set about the
nationalist claim with some gusto and effectiveness, and as a
participant, I went along with this, genuinely believing the SNP claims
were way over-hyped. I am sure Margaret then was little different from
me in this respect.

But we now find - 36 years down
the line - not only that the SNP was correct, but that the entire
Labour Cabinet at the time, Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer
especially, knew this but decided not to tell anyone, including Labour
activists like me and Margaret.

Now I am long out the
Labour Party, and have been lied to so often by Labour that I feel I am kind
of immune to being shocked or outraged. But this one is so close to the
bone, so central to my first experiences of serious political
campaigning that it has shocked even me. "I spent all that time, all
that energy, money I barely had, took all those early morning buses to
Drumchapel, missed out on all these social events, that Elvis Costello concert in Edinburgh,
to campaign on a lie, a lie known to the people who led that campaign?"
And not just the 1978 Garscadden by-election, but the 1979 Referendum
too. Our best argument was denied to us - by our own side.

But Margaret was "not around".

Yet
she most certainly was. Because I do remember, even if she chooses not
to. At that time Glasgow University Labour Club, with over 300
individual members, was the largest in the UK by far. It was "on the
circuit". Everyone who was anyone spoke there - Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock,
Michael Foot all regulars, as were all the leading lights in the Labour
Party in Scotland. And Margaret, as Labour Club Secretary was their
first point of contact, the facilitator. But according to her"not around". Maybe she organised it all on the internet!

One
other detail I must mention before I conclude. Margaret was a leading
light on campus in the "Labour Yes" campaign for the 1979 Referendum.
The "Labour Yes" campaign mind, not "Yes for Scotland", the all party
campaign, where those pesky "nats, liberals and commies" were also
involved. But her direct university and Labour club comrade and friend,
Johan Lamont was not. She was a leading light in the "Labour Vote No"
campaign. You read that right: Johan Lamont, in 1979 actively
campaigned against the ever so modest measure of devolution her own
Labour Government offered the people of Scotland.

Go ask Johan. Or maybe she was "not around" either.

But believe me, they both were, and very much so. Key Labour student activists, earmarked as ones to watch by Helen Liddell the then Scottish Secretary of the Labour Party, situated in Keir Hardie House just
5 minutes walk away from Glasgow University. And Margaret and Johan,
even in these days were on relaxed first name speaking terms with
Donald Dewar, John Reid, Brian Wilson, Robin Cook, John Smith, George
Foulkes, Bruce Milan......the list goes on. "Not around?"
They were part of the show.

Which comes back to my initial question. Why is Margaret denying this?

Simple
to answer: Because she needs to. Without that denial, her credibility
and the credibility of her entire generation that is now running the
Labour Party in Scotland is shot. They were mugged. We were mugged -
because I was part of it too. Scotland was mugged. Poor working class
people in Garscadden were mugged.

Footnote:
Many have commented that, with the exception of the bold Derek Batemen
on his BBC Radio Scotland programme, and unlike the rest of the media,
including STV, BBC Scotland's coverage of this major admission by
arguably the most important Labour politician of the late 1970s early
80s period has been near non existent, especially on TV. There may be
many explanations for this. Here is a possible one:

John Boothman,
Present Head of News and Current Affairs, BBC Scotland: Chairperson of
Strathclyde University Labour Club 1979, Chairperson Scottish
Organisation of Labour Students 1980-81. Chairperson of the National (UK)
Organisation of Labour Students 1981-2. Around at the time? For sure.

20 May 2013

"I’ll tell you what would happen when an independent Scotland proved to be a chimera. Scots would turn inwards, turn on the English and turn on each other. First they would come for the ‘unionists’ as they describe people like me. We would become a ‘fifth column’. Soon other scapegoats would have to be found. Catholic schools, judging by the cyber-nats-speak, would have to succumb. Then it might be the immigrants, brown as well as white who would be ‘taking our jobs’, ‘our houses’, ‘marrying our women’ and the rest. We would become an embittered people, the very opposite of the Scottish internationalist we have been for so long"George Galloway, Red Molluca, 19th May, 2013

Sound familiar? The same shit spouted on Twitter by my bother Ian Smart in his disasterous Twitter foray barely a week ago. I am just waiting for Jack McConnell to directly join in: He is supportive enough to re-tweet their musings.

Because it is no co-incidence that these old chums spout the same smear. Their evidence-free and baseless assertions come from failed generation of Scottish Labour activists who, having delivered near nothing - but managing to enrich themselves in the process - will now spend their later years attacking all things nationalist. The irony is though, nationalism was a horse they themselves were happy to ride, until the good people of Scotland clocked they could do better than be led by these self-serving poseures, who only played the card to gain them some tactical leverage in their internal battles within the Labour Party. Self-determination for them always meant to be on their terms and within parameters of the British labour movement.

This more than anything else explains their later day extreme unionism, so extreme that even the Better Together campaign has all but disowned them: I do wish though Better Together would just do this in quite unequivocal terms. Tell them this is just unacceptable. Slap them down, so as the rest of us can have a sensible debate on Scotland future, uncontaminated by these sad and time-warped sectarians. How about it, Alastair?

Because as I said in my last blog about my brother, this stuff really is the gutter. The politics of Enoch Powell: Stir up a sectional fear for a cheap headline and narrow political gain, not remotely thinking through the potential implications and consequences of your spoutings.

Galloway's latest article is written under the pretext of defending Nigel Farage's right to free speech, following the over-zelous harassment of him by members of the Radical Independence Conference last week in Edinburgh. Now you can view this incident in a number of ways, and certainly I can think of better ways of combating UKIP in Scotland than confronting its leader having a quite pint in a Royal Mile pub. But Galloway don't just make that point, but rather goes into altogether murkier territory, which amounts to a smear on the entire national movement in Scotland.

We are told "cybernats" - and I presume I am one - are " the mirror image of the Faragists" But he get worse.....

"It was once said that anti-semitism was the socialism of fools. So too is the idea that Scotland broken from the rest of this small, island of English- speaking people will somehow lead to some kind of progressive beacon of hope for the world"

So a man who has spent a lifetime dodging the unsupported smear that he is himself anti-semitic, equates supporters of independence, and the left leaning ones in particular, as being little better than anti-semites. Just how low can you go George?

I am kind of aware Galloway's stock in Scotland is now about as low as Farage's - that 2% of the vote in Glasgow in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections took some doing. But I am also aware that beyond Scotland, near universally amongst people who have never worked with him, he retains a significant cult following. So for their benefit, it might be useful to end with a simple list:

Parties in Scotland who support Scottish Independence

The Scottish National Party
The Scottish Green Party
The Scottish Socialist Party
The Socialist Workers Party
The International Socialist Group
Solidarity
The Scottish Republican Socialist Party

Parties in Scotland Who Oppose Scottish Independence

The Scottish Labour Party
The Scottish Liberal Democrats
The Scottish Conservative Party
UKIP
The British National Party
The Scottish Defence League
The Orange Order

7 May 2013

A racist is normally someone with a grievance,
who out of ignorance, and fueled by urban and media myths,
wrongly blames ethic minorities who have absolutely nothing to do
with whatever their problem might be. My brother Ian has few problems, is rather well
healed, well educated and mixes amongst the very highest echelons of
the Scottish establishment. So when he asserts that there will be
some sort of pogrom against the Polish and Pakistani communities (and
presumably others) in a post independence Scotland, he is not doing
this out of ignorance or prejudice, but out of political calculation.
The calculation that if he asserts it loudly and often enough Scotland's ethnic communities and others can
be scared into voting No.

This is called playing the race card.
It is one of the most dangerous things an individual can do in any
context, and of course normally done by politicians of the far right. But for a Labour blogger to do it in Scotland, where there is a hard worked for and commendable cross-party
and cross-society consensus against racial prejudice, and inject it into the highly charge debate on independence is despicable.

No better that
Enoch Powell in 1968: Allow fair non racial immigration into the UK
and there will be “rivers of blood” he predicted, with no evidence and no basis in reality as events have proven. Vote for
Independence in 2014 and my brother predicts something similar for
Scotland.

And what has been the reaction of the
Scottish Labour establishment to the gratuitous playing of the race card by one of their own? At best silence, and in the case of
old chum Jack McConnell supportive. Because sadly, Ian, the
leading Labour blogger in Scotland and a regular TV pundit on this
basis, is an outrider for more than a few of them.

Apologise and retire. All the advice I can offer.

And Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell, Johan and co please note.

A Postscript: This is my first blog post here for near on a year, My last one below is on a similar theme. A
response to George Galloway playing the Green Card in a near
identical context. Same time warped and unsupported bullshit from a washed out "lefty" And hear that
silence from the Laborites on both occasions.

28 May 2012

For the second time in three weeks George Galloway has used his column in The Daily Record to attack independence. No problem with that, if that is what he chooses to speak on. But he is wholly wrong, and miles out of kilter with the vast majority of Scottish socialists, including most of those who campaigned for him in last year's Scottish Parliament elections.

He came, he lost, he learned nothing.

But in today's column, Galloway does more than attack independence. As in his previous Record column, he deliberately introduces the politics of religious sectarianism to advance his case, something no one else in the Unionist camp has done.

Political values, OK. But what has his faith got to do with anything? And to be clear, they are both Christians - they DO share the same faith. What Galloway is blatantly saying here is that he is a Catholic and Brian Souter is a Protestant. And this is something George Galloway, "socialist", consciously brings up in a newspaper column read primarily by West of Scotland working class people in 2012.

Quite appalling

And appalling too that the Daily Record prints this, even pays Galloway to write it.

What is going on here?

And will there be an rebuke for the NO Campaign? Will any Scottish journalists raise this matter? Will the Daily Record do the decent thing and drop immediately this sectarian as a columnist

15 May 2012

As the master debater, Galloway opens his article by setting up a straw man to knock down, citing unarmed nationalists who attacked him in less than civil terms following an anti-independence interview he gave to the Sunday Mail. So what does Galloway do to temper the debate? Responds with comments which are amongst the most disgraceful yet calculated by a politician this century.

Now let me be absolutely clear: Galloway has every right to comment on and participate in the independence debate. As he points out, he is as Scottish as any of us and has a long standing involvement in political discourse in Scotland and elsewhere. But it is this experience, and indeed detailed understanding of Scotland's political history, that make his comments in his Daily Record article so shameful and insidious.

Because Galloway is an intelligent man, yet he quite deliberately plays the sectarian card. A card no one else has used, and no one else - unionist or nationalist - would be as irresponsible or desperate as to introduce into Scotland in 2012.

Supporters of Scotland's independence are used to being called "separatists" by our opponents. And whilst a pejorative term, fair game in the rough and tumble of political discourse. But in writing in the first sentence of his Daily Record article that he was "arguing the case against the 'partition' of this small island" he took things beyond the pale. Because partition means only one thing in the context of the British Isles, as George well knows. And whilst his article does ask a number of legitimate questions of the case for Independence, throughout it is laced, and quite deliberately so, with the language of sectarianism and related smears.

Let me remind readers of what Galloway then goes on to say in his Record article:

"The idea that if you don't believe in Scotland as a mist-shrouded obscurantist Brigadoon, you're not Scottish at all is a recipe for deep division, akin to that which scarred post-independence Ireland."

So, in case you missed his "partition" smear, Galloway quite explicitly introduces Ireland and with it The Troubles.
He then gets even worse by suggesting a "hidden agenda" by his critics, stating, "perhaps it's not where I live now, but where my grandparents came from, that scunners these separatist bigots?"

Now to explain, Galloway's Grandparents were Irish Catholics. I need to explain, because few folks know or care, despite Galloway continuous attempts to remind certain people, when playing to particular galleries. But what Galloway says here, in a mainstream national newspaper, is a quite disgraceful, and simply a slur backed up by nothing other than his own bigoted paranoia and populist opportunism: It suits his script, so why let a lack of evidence get in the way?

But he does not even end there. Just in case anyone might have missed that one. He concludes by stating if things went wrong in an Independent Scotland, "The bravehearts, further embittered, would turn on someone, anyone.....Maybe the immigrants, the asylum seekers, maybe even an earlier generation of immigrants from Catholic Ireland (again, like me)"
Now I directly ask. What is Galloway doing here? ( And what is the Daily Record doing publishing?): Over one third of Scots are descended from Irish Catholics, many of whom vote SNP. This is not just a smear against Scotland's largest political party, it is dangerous tribalism all of us in Scotland, from all parties, and on all sides of the constitutional debate, have been working real hard to bring to an end

But here on 14 May 2012, George Galloway, member of Parliament for Bradford West, former MP for a Glasgow Hillhead, a former Chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland , a current "proud" member of the trade union Unite, and a campaigner for a secular, democratic and free Palestine, is quite consciously introducing the politics of sectarianism into the debate on Scotland's constitutional future.

In condemning the unnamed straw men from the nationalist camp, Galloway ends by, throwing down a challenge to Alex Salmond: " If he was a truly national leader rather than merely a schism-master, would slap this kind of nonsense down, but he dare not."

But if Galloway had even been remotely following the debate in Scotland that has been coming to a head since his self imposed exile a decade ago, he would know, (if he cared to find out) that Alex Salmond and the entire SNP leadership has consistently done this and continues to. Alex Salmond does not need a lecture on bigotry from a sectarian who sat on his hands whilst it raged in the Scottish Labour Party of the 1980s he chaired. And in May 2011 Salmond's SNP won 69 seats and 45% of the vote, and all available evidence shows no religious bias whatsover in terms of where the party drew its support from. Can Galloway credibly say the same about the paltry 3.3% of votes he polled in Glasgow on that same day?

But I'd like end by throwing Galloway's challenge to Salmond back to the pro-union parties in Scotland, who he now seem so keen to team up with. Will they unequivocally condemn Galloway's sectarian intervention into Scotland's constitutional debate? With they tell him he is not at all welcome if this is to be the tenor of his contribution?. Will they tell him modern day Scots - unionists and nationalists - have left his dated and vile sectarian baggage behind us?